Planet of Slums

Although I'm not a regular Mother Jones reader, I found my way today to this review of "Planet of Slums," a new book by Mike Davis.  I've blogged often over the past few years about urbanism ("new" and old), cities, suburbs, Jane Jacobs, and Philip Bess, and so I was intrigued by Davis's discussion (as related by the reviewer, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) of "urbanization without growth," a phenomenon which "has baffled development economists for years—especially those working in sub-Saharan African, where mega-cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and Dar Es Salaam go on attracting tens of thousands of new arrivals each year even as their formal economies stagnate or even contract."

Now, according to the review, the primary villain in Davis's book is the IMF and its neo-liberal economic policies.  Maybe so.  But this bit from the review caught my eye:

Without formal work, and without the entry into secular politics that such work has traditionally provided, how do the poorest of the urban poor organize their social and political life? What offers them a “communal structure”? To this critical question, Davis offers a one-word answer: religion. “If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”

Today, religious organizations—Islamist, Hindu, Evangelical—are the single most important source of social cohesion among citydwellers in the developing world. Beyond spiritual sustenance and community, religious organizations offer social services no longer provided by the state, laws for virtuous conduct in chaotic environs, and membership in a global polity that transcends the corrupt nation-state that has excluded them. Political Islam continues to spread in power and influence from Cairo to Jakarta; the ascendance of its political parties—and their grassroots appeal—has received nervous attention from the Western media. Hindu fundamentalism, if remarked upon less often, has had an analogous trajectory in the bustees of Delhi and Mumbai. Pentecostal sects attract new adherents at astonishing rates from Brasilia to Johannesburg, altering political and community life in ways as yet not understood.

It is, I think, an interesting question:  Are today's "mega-cities" really "cities," in the way that "new urbanists" think of cities.  Are they, for instance -- in Joel Kotkin's words -- "sacred, safe, and busy"?  Could they be?